440 N. 15th St. has a ton of potential, considering its large size, its permissive zoning, and its location just off North Broad Street. But it hasn’t come close to living up to that potential for a really long time, as it’s been used as a parking garage for the Inquirer building for many years. In 2011, before the Inquirer even made the move to Market Street, Community College of Philadelphia purchased the property with an eye toward expansion. It took quite awhile, but last year, we told you about plans from CCP and Radnor Property Group to redevelop this parcel, a plan that called for two 11-story buildings and roughly 500 units.

Checking in on the property now, we see that the old garage is getting demoed. An official groundbreaking took place last week, and we can expect the first phase of construction to ramp up in the coming months. The project has been dubbed The Hamilton, perhaps because Hamilton Street bounds the northern side of this property, or maybe because they figured the name would be terrible for SEO purposes.

Somewhere along the line, the plans for this site changed. As we said, the original plan called for a pair of 11-story buildings, but the revised plan calls for one 10-story building and one 16-story building. The 10-story building will come first, with the 16-story building to follow, with a total of 600 units between the pair. The project also calls for 8,000 sqft of retail space and 150 parking spaces below grade. You can see, there will also be community spaces on each rooftop as well as in the courtyard between the buildings.

When we first covered this project, we believed it would exclusively target CCP students. We even explained the need for housing near campus so that CCP could better attract international students, who pay considerably higher tuition rates than local students. Looking at the description on the developer’s website though, it seems to us that the project will be open to a much wider net of possible tenants, including but not exclusively a student population. Opening these buildings to the community at large certainly makes the project less risky, though we wonder whether those valuable international students might get shut out if locals enjoy living here. Whether it’s students or young professionals that ultimately move into these units, they’ll add much needed vitality to what has been a lousy stretch for more years than we can remember.

Maybe in about a year, we’ll be back, time will tell, you’ll remember that we told you well (about this project).